1,721,286 research outputs found
Replication data for: "Social Cohesion, Religious Beliefs, and the Effect of Protestantism on Suicide"
No full textBecker, Sascha O., and Woessmann, Ludger, (2018) “Social Cohesion, Religious Beliefs, and the Effect of Protestantism on Suicide.” Review of Economics and Statistics 100:3, 377-391
Replication data for: "Social Cohesion, Religious Beliefs, and the Effect of Protestantism on Suicide"
No full textBecker, Sascha O., and Woessmann, Ludger, (2018) “Social Cohesion, Religious Beliefs, and the Effect of Protestantism on Suicide.” Review of Economics and Statistics 100:3, 377-391
International risk sharing in the short run and in the long run
Full text linkUsing a panel of 23 industrialised countries, the paper investigates how short-run and long-run income risks are shared and how the source of uncertainty matters for the way this risk gets insured. Surprisingly, short-term and long-term output risks are found to be equally well insured. Transitory shocks get smoothed almost completely whereas permanent shocks remain 80 percent uninsured. We find a somewhat more important role for international capital markets than earlier studies. Whereas our results tie in with some recent theoretical insights and are consistent with empirical findings on home bias in international portfolios, they raise the question why permanent shocks are so hard to insure internationally
Business Informality in Colombia: An Obstacle For Creative Destruction
Full text linkThis document studies the effects of business informality in terms of distortions in resource absorption, particularly labor, by informal companies. It also assesses the consequences of lower demand for labor of informal firms over aggregate productivity. With firm level data from the DANE Micro-establishments Survey, a matching exercise between formal and informal firms is conducted. It was found that the latter hire fewer employees than formal firms with the same characteristics, including Total Factor Productivity. The matching results allow using counterfactual demands of labor of informal firms to calculate and compare the real and counterfactual aggregate productivity levels. The results indicate that if informal firms would demand the amount of employment demanded by similar formal firms, market share distributionof firms would improve and this would positively affect aggregate productivity.Informal sector, Labor demand, Factor demand, Aggregate productivity, Colombia.
iPEHD – The ifo Prussian economic history database
Full text linkThis paper provides a documentation of the ifo Prussian Economic History
Database (iPEHD), a county-level database covering a rich collection of variables
for 19th -century Prussia. The Royal Prussian Statistical Office collected these data
in several censuses over the years 1816-1901, with much county-level
information surviving in archives. These data provide a unique source for microregional
empirical research in economic history, enabling analyses of the
importance of such factors as education, religion, fertility, and many others for
Prussian economic development in the 19th century. The service of iPEHD is to
provide the data in a digitized and structured way
Not the opium of the people : income and secularization in a panel of Prussian counties
Full text linkThe interplay between religion and the economy has occupied social scientists for long. We construct a unique panel of income and Protestant church attendance for six waves of up to 175 Prussian counties spanning 1886-1911. The data reveal a marked decline in church attendance coinciding with increasing income. The cross-section also shows a negative association between
income and church attendance. But the association disappears in panel analyses, including firstdifferenced models of the 1886-1911 change, panel models with county and time fixed effects, and panel Granger-causality tests. The results cast doubt on causal interpretations of the religioneconomy nexus in Prussian secularization
Inflation, price dispersion and market integration through the lens of a monetary search model
Full text linkRecent monetary search models emphasize that the real effects of inflation via its impact on price dispersion depend on the level of search costs and, thus, on the level of market integration. For less integrated markets, the inflation-price dispersion nexus is predicted to be asymmetrically V-shaped which implies an optimal inflation rate above zero. For highly integrated markets, however, theory suggests that the impact of inflation on price dispersion disappears. Employing price data of the European Union member states, this paper is the first that empirically tests these implications of monetary search theory. --Inflation,Relative price variability,Monetary search models,European market integration
Wars, Taxation and Representation:Evidence from Five Centuries of German History
Full text linkWe provide causal evidence for the role of warfare in the development of medieval constitutionalism. Using novel data on the universe of German cities between 1290 and 1710, we show that military conflicts led to city councils that were larger, more likely to be elected by citizens, and more likely to include representatives of craft guilds. Additionally, these conflicts resulted in a substantial increase in local fiscal and spending capacity. We exploit the gender of the firstborn children of local nobles as a source of exogenous variation in conflicts.<br/
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